At this point, people were stranded in weird places. Car owners were stranded at petrol stations having ordered full tank hoping to pay with the often reliable MPESA. They had to park their car as they sought alternative ways to settle their bills. Revelers at the many entertainment joints had extended hours trying to pay their bills. Patients at hospitals were turned away. Queues and queues of Shoppers at supermarkets left their full baskets at tills. Online platforms were not spared either. The shopping carts were abandoned.
I was stranded like the rest, and finally managed to pay with the mpesa at 8.08pm. See, I was determined. I had consumed products, and I did not have any alternative way to pay. That is how successful Safaricom has managed to make Mpesa part of our lives.
At around 9.24pm, Safaricom sent this SMS
"M-PESA is undergoing scheduled maintenance."
Of course that downtime was not a scheduled maintenance. So now a respected company with a top notch communications team had resorted to small lies that add no value to their brand. Desperate times truly calls for desperate measures. An unexpected downtime is not the same as scheduled maintenance. Scheduled maintenance is communicated early in advance to all parties. This was not the case with this particular scenario.
Back to my payment, I manged to sneak in the payment in the midst of the "scheduled maintenance". But the deductions of my mpesa balance were completely off. I informed the establishment. They investigate from their system (which is just mpesa SMSes from their feature phone), and them too had got one message indicating my payment.
My previous balance did not add up when the current purchase is included. It was way less. The mpesa statement could also not reconcile where the difference of my balance had gone. It only showed one transaction. So for example, if I had a balance of Ksh20,000, and make a purchase of Ksh5,000, the balance should be Ksh15,000. But now my balance read Ksh10,000. Today is Tuesday, 11th December, and I'm yet to be united with my funds.
It's good the CS Hon Mucheru has asked for a systems audit of the mpesa platform. In the audit, they should capture how many transactions were eronouse, and where users' balances disappeared to. It may be mischievous individuals carting our balances the NHIF and KPC way.